I'm coming this really late, and it is GamerGate tangential, so I don't want to inflame anything - my understanding is that games journalists took a page from Ezra Klien's JournoList (sorry, can't use markup UI on my phone)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/JournoList
called GameJournoPros. I've only gone down the rabbit hole so far, but it's pretty clear they set an agenda called "Gamers Are Dead" (not sure the origin of the coinage, where a coordinated meme-bomb went off on dozen ostensibly competing, unafilliated sites with a single week. They are, at my most charitable, a strange antagonism against video game enthusiasts, and an effort to create this "anti-gamer" gamer culture.
Compared to the actual JournoList and it's power, it's bush league stuff, but it's particularly strange as games journalists are also the industry PR and it's all so incestual.
You can jump down the rabbit hole yourself, or I'm sure folks here know way more, but that's my fairly neutral take (I'm not pro-GG or anti- GG).